Friday, 5 May 2017

#49: Siege Of Sardath

SIEGE OF SARDATH

Keith P. Phillips

Reviewed by Mark Lain

Three things
immediately spring to mind when people mention this book. The first is that it
is by an author that no-one has ever heard of, the second is its reputation for
being exceptionally difficult to complete, and the third is that the cover
suggests it is probably going to be about Elves. But before we discuss these
points, I have to say that the title is somewhat misleading given the plot.

When I first
played this I genuinely expected a Fangs
Of Fury-type book where you have to be involved directly in the titular
siege before heading off to try to stop whichever nutter is besieging your
home. The latter is kind of true here, but at no point do you get involved in,
or even really witness, a siege as such. Instead, you play a ranger who sits on
the Council of the town of Grimmund in the hitherto unexplored far north-east
of Allansia. Next to Grimmund is the massive Forest Of Night which has been
taken over by a dark unpleasantness making it unpassable. At the far side of
the forest is the much larger city of Sardath (which is built on stilts in the
centre of a lake) that has consequently been rendered inaccessible. The rest of
the Council are blaming all the spiders that inhabit the forest and want to
launch a pre-emptive strike but YOU, in your capacity as the eco-friendly voice
of reason (ie an experienced ranger), think there could be something else amiss
and you volunteer to head off into the forest to sort everything out. In the
midst of the debate another ranger type appears and instantly wreaks mayhem
when it turns out that he is actually that ranger’s evil doppelganger from a
mysterious species known simply as “Black Flyers” (that look very like mutated
Dark Elves with wings, which it transpires, is what they are). Once he has (or
maybe even hasn’t) been dealt with you head off on your mission which divides
roughly into three main Acts: the forest itself (which can be partially
negotiated by river if you wish), the Freezeblood Mountains, and finally the
underground lair of the Dark Elf baddies.

To drive home
the fact that your character is a talented ranger, several of the FF staples
have been modified in this book. Bundles Of Herbs (you start with just 5) act
as a Provision substitute (and you can pick more along the way to get more
Provisions/Herbs) and you carry a bow as well as a dwarf-forged sword. In
certain combat situations you have the option to fire arrows (appropriate
distances pending, naturally) to do instant damage pre-combat, although you
only start with 6 arrows and extras are in short supply so you need to use this
feature sparingly. You also begin with a generous 15 Gold Pieces (which proves
less generous when you soon meet a trader who charges quite a lot for his
wares) and a council signet ring which acts as a diplomatic passport of sorts
(although not very often). The matching of kit to characterisation is done very
well in this book and you are steeped in character from the outset. This is not
a “learn who you are” gamebook, instead it’s a “we expect you to know who you
are” outing and, as you are unlikely to realistically achieve this in initial
playthroughs, the book does throw the occasional awkward-seeming compulsive
reaction at you eg: a moment where you are forced to thump someone because, and
I quote, “his scornful tone upsets your natural sense of honour and fairness”.
Less “YOU are the Hero” then, maybe, and more “YOU are on a steep learning
curve to be the Hero that the book has predesigned for YOU”? But this is a
minor criticism of a dense logical plot that is full of surprises to discover
and, by all accounts, as you will have to play it many many times to come
anywhere close to winning, you will soon get the hang of what being an
“experienced ranger” is all about!

And now we
inevitably come to the subject of the difficulty level of this book which is,
quite frankly, off the scale. But this book is made very hard for slightly
different reasons to the handful of other mega-difficult FF books. Many factors
are at play here to conspire against you but, oddly enough, they all seem to
work well rather than being a depressing catalogue of annoyances and this must
be down to the fact that, as medieval “trek about the place” gamebooks go, this
one is more intelligent than usual and is intellectually very demanding on the
player, rather than just relying primarily on unbalanced dice-based decision
points like many FFs do and/or on a huge shopping list of essential items. Yes,
there are several items you must find, but the emphasis is placed firmly on a
lot of incidental factual detail that must be extracted from the text, much of
which is either mentioned in passing or that is rendered somewhat unobvious. I
realise that this also is far from unusual, but it is the way the detail is
presented here which really makes this book stand out as being particularly
high-brow. The conundrum that really epitomises this is a puzzle that you come
across very early on: six squares are drawn with a pattern on them and you must
fathom out what the hidden message is within it by piecing the parts together. The
actual solution almost certainly requires you to copy the page, cut it up, and
then join the pieces back together correctly into what turns out to be a cube.
Assuming you can even manage to do this much, from this you are then supposed
to decipher a message which is the letters “IST”. The text tells you to find a
hidden section using this info which you almost certainly won’t be able to do
as the section is not the usual “letter of the alphabet equals a number” FF
trick but is, instead, the closest numbers visually to these letters. “I” is
obviously “1” and “S” is “5” but what number looks like “T”? Er, none of them.
The answer is rather tenuously “7”. We are in a whole new world of pain with
this one then. If this one puzzle alone is not enough to melt your brain, it
will soon dawn on you that everything of any importance to completing this book
is riddled, varying from some admittedly easy (if you know the language of FF
trickery) stuff, through some bits that require a bit of lateral thinking in
line with picking detail from the text, right up to a few moments (such as the
cube puzzle) of genuine obscurity.

Amongst the other
mind-bending enigmas to get your head round are: using the seven-coiled snake
ring which doubles its coils to become a 14-coiled snake ring which you have to
add to the number associated with the Ring of Three Centuries – this is not
that hard if you apply a bit of logic but it certainly had me stumped the first
few times I tried to work it out plus you need to pay attention to the fact
that the snake ring doubles its coils late in the book and you do need to find
hidden sections based on BOTH numbers of coils; using the Brain Slayer Amulet
which involves you needing to know Roman numerals and, again, its number
changes later on to a more complex Roman numeral based on a bit of info you
pick up by making a sort of Skype call via a special communing mirror; another
Roman numeral hidden more subtly this time in Mystery Potion X which again has
to be added to a section number; at one
point you can invoke Itsu (if you’ve cracked the cube puzzle earlier) by multiplying
his secret number by 10 but his secret number is rather obscurely the number
guardian that he is – again, close reading will reveal this but it could catch
you out and the text is rather vague about how to find his number; then there’s the potion making machine which
only works if you can find the instructions of use and you still need to have
one of each requisite type of ingredient – so we are in familiar shopping list
territory with this but there are four possible combinations (that I can find
anyway) and if you have the right parts to be able to attempt any of the four (which
all involve matching ingredient numbers to hidden sections, of course) you will
discover that one is basically essential, two are useless, and one will kill
you on the spot.

All this
compulsory code-cracking is in itself very challenging, but that’s not where
the ramped-up difficulty ends and it is definitely where the inevitable
comparisons with Steve Jackson’s Creature
Of Havoc will begin as, in the latter parts, you must look out for phrases
in the text which act as subtle prompts to add or subtract numbers from the
current section to find the actual intended hidden paragraph. I must admit
that, in the post-SJ hidden section trickery world of FF this is rather less of
a surprise than it was when it first appeared in SJ’s books and is one of the
better-signposted aspects of Siege Of
Sardath’s difficulty, but it can scupper you nonetheless especially if you
haven’t gleaned the necessary information to even know to look out for these.
In a literal lift from Creature Of Havoc there
is a secret door to find this way, as well as a key plot moment where you start
a Dwarf slave revolt, and a series of prompts when you are disguised as a Dark
Elf that will stop you from being killed for being human.

Mercifully
though, amidst all of this book’s exceptionally tough hidden paragraph tricks,
there are also two that I found extremely easy. There is a magic square that
opens another hidden door behind which is an essential part of the optimum
potion and I found its numerical puzzle very straightforward, ditto the secret
knocking sequence (which is literally just simple addition) that you need to
access the final episode. In a similar vein, a very interesting mechanic comes
into play in the later stages where you need to develop a basic grasp of the
Dark Elf language. This is not too hard as it is laid-on quite thick and only
demands that you learn basic one-word interactions which are given as options
for once rather than requiring manipulation of words to find hidden sections
(well that’s generous, isn’t it!) but it is another feature that will require
you to pay attention to the text.

Somewhere
between the super-hard and the less mentally strenuous is the book’s subtlest
design trick – that of allowing you to choose when to turn to special sections
to read something or make use of an item. The best example of this is the page
you can find that describes dangerous fungi. Two are discussed and, if you read
it early enough, it will make negotiating the Dwarf Mines and the Dark Elf
sacrifice cameos much more safe and obvious. I like this level of voluntary
interaction and this is helpful to rather than being essential to victory. The
flipside of this though is the optional way that the Brain Slayer Amulet works:
if you put it on you must reduce your Skill by 2 for as long as you are wearing
it which naturally makes combat and Skill tests much harder, but you absolutely
must be wearing it before you meet the end baddie for the final showdown so
remembering to put it back on this late on may well slip your mind. Ok, you can
cheat and pretend you’ve got it on (and no-one will know in the way that a RPG
GM would be able to penalise you) but this is so subtle that you would probably
miss it and die as a consequence either from Skill-based weakness (this could
reduce your Skill to 5) or being pasted for mishandling a key item at the end.

Which brings
us neatly to stat considerations. For a notoriously tough gamebook, SoS does not rely much on Luck testing
or tough combats. Most opponents are easy to beat and the tougher ones will
usually have a high Skill or Stamina offset against the other stat being
relatively low. Add to this the fact that your puzzle-cube-exposed sidekick
Istu will fight a certain number of combats for you before it gets sent back to
the Demonic Plain and you get a book that does not demand that you have
superhuman Stamina or Luck scores. That said, there are a lot of Skill tests to
contend with so a high Skill is useful (especially if you forget to take the
Brain Slayer Amulet off) but it is possible to get a +1 Initial Skill boost (up to a maximum of 12) so even that is
generous stat-wise. Furthermore, there are several opportunities to increase
all three of your stats and Stamina in particular is not too hard to maintain
at a high level so death by Stamina loss is fairly unlikely. This is a relief
as losing by not having or fathoming out essential info almost certainly will
finish you off sooner or later! Similarly, it is possible to find an item which
makes you extra-strong when fighting Dark Elves or Black Flyers (which there
are a lot of as the story unfolds) and deals them 3 rather than 2 points of
Stamina damage in combat, although it only lasts for four battles. On top of that,
another item will allow you to automatically pass any Luck tests that you will
need to do in the Dark Elf underground city. This is very useful as failing any
of these tests result in instant death. In brief then, this is one of the rare
FFs where you really can hope to win with rubbish starting stats although this
gesture is all but eliminated by the fundamental solution to the book which is
based around the sheer number of puzzles that you need to solve.

So, this is a
book crawling with hidden secrets, but the factors contributing to its extreme
difficulty level do not begin and end with this. You are in a race against time
and the Adventure Sheet has boxes representing each day of an Allansian week.
With this we get some nice lore exploitation as the days are named in line with
Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World’s
model and as you progress through the book each new day requires you to tick
off the next day of the week. From roughly the half-way point you will be
prompted occasionally to check what day it is. If it is the last day of the
week you have run out of time, the Dark Elves/Black Flyers have over-run the
region and you have failed. In other words, you cannot waste time by bumbling
around all over the place and finding the swiftest route through (that involves
visiting all the necessary places and people to get all the items and info that
you cannot win without) is essential to victory. The introduction tells you
that trial and error should be avoided and that instead you should use good
thinking. This interlinks neatly with the demands of characterisation that the
book puts on you, but the only realistic way you can achieve this is through a
lot of replaying and mapping and you can only work out what is a good or bad
choice by trying it. Again, this means you are going to lose a lot of times.

In addition
to the puzzles and time limit factors, there are a further two features which
are designed to hinder and/or kill you. The Dark Elf underground city is laid
out as an MC Escher-style maze with impossibly-connected passages, stairways
and doors that all deceive the eye. Apparently this is because Dark Elf
architecture is designed to induce madness and this is why you must test your
Luck to avoid blundering off an edge of it due to sheer confusion. This is a
nice bit of plot extemporisation but it does make for an intensely frustrating
part of the book as you loop about and double-back on yourself in a bid to get
through it in one piece. Considerably more irritating than this though, is the
final confrontation with the villain of the piece which immediately follows the
disorientating city.

For a book that is so intricately and cleverly designed,
the “climax” is a huge disappointment. On the one hand, it does not use the
usual fallback ending of a stupidly hard combat that is weighted heavily
against you, but instead it involves a dialogue with the end baddie. What’s
wrong with that, you may ask. Well, the solution to this conversational
showdown is little more than you guessing which options to choose. Guess right
and you get another option. This happens several times. Guess any of these
options wrong at any point and you are dead. You do need to try to bluff him,
which is admittedly a neat touch, but you don’t really know what you are doing
and repeatedly dying just by guessing wrong really does ruin the ending
especially as, given what you have gone through mentally to get this far, you
deserve a better denouement and you really should have been allowed to win by
this point.

As a parallel
to the annoying ending, it is also possible to lose as soon as you begin. If
you can’t apprehend the doppelganger ranger who tries to disrupt the Council
meeting at the start you can get carried off by him and deposited at a
mid-point in the forest from where, as you have already missed key items and
info, you cannot possibly win. I don’t like it when gamebooks make you lose
from the outset but, that said, this outcome is far less likely than you
managing to deal with the doppelganger so this is not quite as annoying as it
could have been, even though it highlights the fact that not visiting any one
of the key places or NPCs will lead to certain failure. In other words, this
one is very linear overall, although there is replay value in the fact that
there is so much to explore, as one thing this book does have is variety.

A
well-designed gamebook should have a varied selection of locations and
incidents and this one offers this in spades with every encounter offering
something different to what has preceded it. This is anything but a one-note
effort and particular highlights for me are exploring Corianthus’ castle where
everything is giant-sized and you keep being reminded of this, meeting the
amphibious Slykk, and helping the Dwarves in their war against the Toa-Suo
which, it turns out, are what the big baddie uses to wreak havoc during the day
as the Black Flyers are sensitive to daylight. This is excellent depth of lore
and it does not stop there because dwarves live in mountain mines, dwarves and
elves use different languages and, in a Tolkien-esque touch, there are multiple
names for things and places which are stated in both Elven and Dwarven
languages. Very intelligent stuff. There is an amusing moment when you can meet
the rather irrational goddess Thyra Migurn who creates storms to antagonise the
Dwarves because she disapproves of them mining the mountains and there are even
a few almost Cthulhu-influenced moments with horrific monstrosities such as the
Xanthic Horror. There is one let-down as regards cameos though and that is that
you cannot actually reach Sardath itself. There are plenty of opportunities to
head for it, but the lake surrounding it has become very dangerous due to
recent events and you can only get part of the way across before you have to
turn back. I would have liked to have known about the city that the book takes
its title from but, at the same time, this does make Sardath somewhat enigmatic
which is not a bad thing. The various races create a well-designed system of
interaction and the rarely explored world of north-east Allansia really comes
to life. There is an unusual depth to the species detail at times especially
with the three distinct types of spiders that are blighting the Forest Of Night
and we get vivid descriptions of their behaviour which, logically, directly
affects their motives towards you and their level of dangerousness. Elves get
decent coverage too as the forest’s Wood Elves behave very differently to the
evil Dark Elves which, in turn, have minor differences to their mutated version
(Black Flyers). Equally, herblore comes to the fore as your ranger skills allow
you to identify potential sources of food and healing and can also help you to
contend with certain plants. Furthermore, the local lore can directly aid or
hinder your progress (see comments on the fungus book page above). Linked into
the concept of local lore and your ranger talents of course is the focus in
this book on observation and close reading rather than brute force (the lack of
an end baddie combat in favour of a war of words highlights this), so this all
ties together very effectively.

Indeed, this
is a very well-written book and you do get the feeling that Phillips was aiming
for something (intellectually, at least) a cut above the usual FF fare. In this
sense it brings to mind a series such as Blood
Sword which is very demanding on the reader both in design and in
vocabulary terms. The words used in SoS
are far from complex but this book just reads much more elegantly than the FF
norm. A curiosity in how this book is written though becomes quickly apparent in
the way that you will sometimes be given an option early in a paragraph. If you
don’t want to pick this you can read on but you will find yourself reading on
anyway and, in doing so, you then find out what happens if you don’t choose the
first option. This gives you a weird second sight which can be a bit confusing.
It would have been better to put this in another section even if this resulted
in exceeding 400 paragraphs. There are also a few inconsistencies between the
text and the art where the illustrations contradict what the corresponding
section tells you. This is particularly noticeable when you meet the Wood Elves
and you are told that your Elf friend has a scar over his right eye. In the
image the scar is over his left eye. Is this an error or a clue that you are in
fact talking to his evil doppelganger? Likewise, in the Dark Elf city we are
told that part of it is under construction yet this is nowhere to be seen in
the illustration which shows what appears to be a completed area. That aside
though, the internal art is generally pretty effective although it seems a
little lacking to me, but I can’t quite put my finger on why - perhaps the
depth of the text exposes this more than was intended? This is not a big issue
though and does not take anything away from the book as a whole. The cover art,
however, is largely uninteresting and, other than telling us that Elves might
come into the equation, could not be much further from reflecting the book’s
contents.

At this
point, I have to mention two moments that really jar with me. One is a literal
error in that section 171 (in first printings at least, which my copy is) is
inaccessible, although this was apparently fixed in subsequent printings. It is
not a massive mistake, but it can mean that you get sent in the wrong direction
if you handle the Slime Mould encounter in the forest in a particular way. The
second bothers me much more and that is the key moment when you find an eagle
in the mountains. You need to be carried by it to Corianthus’ castle and the
text asks you to write down what you choose to do to show it that you are
friendly. Are you really going to think of something as abstract as “Hold up
the Brass Key”? Oh yeah, because eagles are known to take brass keys as a
gesture of good will, aren’t they? This is so obscure as to be the sort of
ludicrous command that you used to have to type into classic text adventures!
Yet another thing that evidences just how indescribably hard this book really
is.

So then, SoS has a wholly deserved reputation for
being very difficult and it is one of the hardest gamebooks in the FF series,
but not for the conventional reasons that we normally associate with tough
gamebooks. For this, Phillips must be applauded as he has taken hidden section
elements from Steve Jackson’s harder books, mixed in a bit of Keith Martin
maths trickery, added some Ian Livingstone shopping lists and obscure enigmas,
and made the mixture his own by taking it all to the next level and creating
something very cerebral that will tax even the most adept at seeing through
gamebook tricks and traps. Moving the emphasis away from hard combats and onto
seriously challenging puzzles makes for a very original book that is memorable
for its combination of lore, exciting pacing, varied events, and excellent
prose. It is certainly not perfect as the true path involves solving some stuff
that is a bridge too far for anyone that isn’t some sort of super-genius but,
once you’ve given up (which is likely) and read the solution you cannot help
but be impressed by its intricacies and how brilliantly designed this book
really is. The desire to win will keep you thinking and encourage replay and
this is a book that, thanks to its many qualities, deserves to be explored and
unravelled thoroughly. SoS cannot be
put in the ranks of the very best FFs because its solution is so obscure that I
can’t believe many people have beaten it without cheating, but it is certainly
well above average and is outstandingly well-written. If you want a real
brain-teaser but can’t face the extremities of Casket Of Souls then this is the gamebook for you. Plus, if this is representative of what Phillips is capable of gamebook-wise, then it's a real shame that he did not write any others for the series.

Absolutely fantastic analysis! This is one of my favourite FFs, and it's one that is frequently neglected. Little has been written about it online, as far as I can tell, anyway, so it's great so see such an in-depth review.

This book has always haunted me in the same way that Creature of Havok and House of Hell have, and I think you've put your finger on some of the reasons why. All three create vast, consistent worlds that drew me in. All three were fiendishly difficult to beat, making me want to explore the worlds again and again. For me, this difficulty gave the books a sense of mystery. I never felt as though I was losing just because of unfair combat stats or anything like that (I'd have cheated anyway!) but I always had the feeling that there was some puzzle I was missing. Some key factor that I couldn't spot, no matter how many times I tried.

You've done a superb job of detailing the depth of the puzzles in Siege of Sardath, making me admire its complexity all over again! I may have to head into the Forest of Night one more time ...

Wonderful comment, Steampunk! Great to see someone revel in the difficulty! Creature of Havoc was my first ever FF and the one I came back to again and again until I beat it finally as an adult! Wonderful storytelling! SoS suffers from a lot of the errors/difficulties that Malthus picked out but thanks for the comment!

Was this book actually re-printed ? From what I understand, the last batch of books in the original series only had one print run. So I'm not sure if the error you mentioned was ever corrected.

And I too had that feeling that steampunk described. Of having missed something. I remember going through the book methodically to find the one true path but even when I reached the end, I realised that I had still taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way.

Given the complexity of this adventure , I'm not sure how even Keith Phillips managed to keep track of every detail.

Just finished reading all of your FF reviews, really enjoyed your insights. Are you going to review "howl of the werewolf" and "night of the necromancer"? Also "port of peril" as that is the flavour of the moment

Great. Just played legacy of the vampire, which was really well written and enjoyable. I liked the Jonathan harker-ness of the YOU, and the "leaving the west and entering the east" reference was a nice touch